2016 January 21

Santa Cruz Shakespeare—Oregon Shakespeare

Santa Cruz Shakespeare (SCS) is organizing a trip to Ashland to see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) before the SCS season starts. It sounds like fun, but …

The trip is March 16–March 19, 2016, at the end of exam week, with grades due on March 22.

It costs $1250 a person (a bit high for a bus trip, 3 plays, and 3 nights of hotel—a lot more than the AFE trips my son took that saw 4–5 plays and several workshops).

Deposits have to be made before Feb 6.

They are going all that way by bus and then only seeing 3 plays.

My wife is not excited by the plays they plan to see:

an adaptation of Glibert and Sullivan’s Yeoman of the Guard

Twelfth Night

Great Expectations

I must confess, I’m not particularly excited by those choices either. Yeoman of the Guard is not the best of G&S, and I’ve no idea what OSF is doing in the adaptation. Adding country music does not sound appealing to me.

I think my wife and I both like Twelfth Night, but my wife is afraid that I’ll be comparing it to a performance that I saw in Berkeley when I was a grad student at Stanford (so almost 40 years ago). That performance included the a capella group Oak, Ash, and Thorn singing all the songs that are alluded to in the script (there are a lot of them), in addition to good acting and staging. I doubt I’ll ever see as good a Twelfth Night again. What amazes me is that the band is still together and still (sometimes) performing in the Bay Area. (Hey, maybe Santa Cruz Shakespeare could hire them to do a great Twelfth Night performance!)

Great Expectations is not my favorite Dickens story (actually, I’m not sure I have a favorite Dickens story—it’s been a long time since I’ve read any of them).

Of course, so early in the season OSF only has 4 plays running (the SCS trip doesn’t include River Bride, which seemed the most interesting of the 4 plays running early. Later on the OSF season gets more varied and more interesting, but SCS will be in rehearsal or production then, and unable to run a tour bus up to Ashland.

Maybe some year SCS will do the trip during UCSC’s spring break and OSF’s first plays of the season will be more enticing—then my wife and I might find the prospect more alluring (though going up later in the season, when it would be possible to see a wider variety of plays, is still more appealing).